The ever excellent Karenne has been writing a very well thought out list of reasons why she doesn’t like text books (part 5 of the series here) on her Kalinago blog and, what with it being a pet peeve of many teachers, me included, I though I’d add my thoughts on the subject.
I’ve recently been using the ‘Total English‘ elementary book. Let me get this straight, this isn’t a terrible book by any means, it merely rates alongside the many others that have basically followed in Headway’s wake over the past 20 years. Basically, there is no one reason why I dislike this any more than any other series I’ve had to use over the past ten years of teaching English. If that doesn’t come across as a resounding recommendation then that’s because it is as guilty as any other material that follows the standard course book pattern: it restrains the language learner.
Course book as straitjacket
But surely a course book offers a safe and friendly environment for bother teacher and learner? I agree that it adds a great deal of security and certainty in many classroom situations, but it often really limits learning. Consider this, and please let me know if you disagree, all a student can do is meet an expectation from any given task. They can’t show you what they are capable of, nor can they go beyond the limits of any given exercise. Any unit has particular aims set out and the student can achieve them or not. This is a strong argument against the grammar driven syllabus: ‘today you are going to learn this structure and don’t you even think about using any other!’
A case in point
Let me illustrate what I mean with an example from the book in question. Here we have a fairly orthodox production activity for the grammar point ‘there is / there are’. The resultant piece would amount to a group of sentences along the line of ‘there is a museum, there are two statues but there aren’t any rivers.’
By loosening the reigns a little, however, I managed to transform this exercise into something more. I’d like to share a couple of pieces of my students work with you to show you what I mean.
In setting up the activity, I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to the instructions in the book. I found it highly unlikely that anybody would…
- actually hand write an email, never mind
- describe their country to someone in this way.
I decided that I would make the process a relaxed affair, a twenty-minute end of the day activity to cap off what had been covered during the previous three lessons.
Rather than scaffold the activity by giving a model and dictating that they had to try and incorporate the grammar structures we had looked at, I allowed them to go with whatever they felt they needed to complete the task.
Here are a couple of examples.
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I’ve used this textbook myself, and as you say it is by no means a bad textbook. It has interesting topics, a nice dvd, good teachers guide with some great photocopiables… everything you could need. But that is exactly the problem – there is no room for the teacher or (more importantly) the students to bring anything of themselves! Of course, once you start skipping stuff or adapting it, the book becomes pointless…. I’d have been happy to have taken the dvd and the photocopiables, you can keep the rest!
There is a place for textbooks… in contexts where trained, proficient teachers are hard to come by a well structured textbook can be very useful. But even then it would be better to source locally produced books.
Love what you and your students got up to though ; D
Thanks Darren, I see that we’re of the same mind! I am strongly against the ‘one size fits all’ mentality that the publishers do all that they can to propagate. I understand why, profit is king, but you’re really shortchanging the learner if you don’t adapt your product to the customer’s needs.
I love your blog, keep up the good work!
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